Monday, March 17, 2014

Holy Voxels! Resogun is Fantastic

Quick Note: Resogun is a fantastic, simple game that everyone should try. Filled with simple gameplay and gorgeous graphics, it's hard to put down. It's free on PS Plus and only $15 to download and has hours of content for those who are committed.

Videogames have come a long way since the genre's inception in the mid 1950's. Today there is professional voice acting and motion capture to allow actors to embody these characters that we as gamers control. Gorgeous graphics grace our screens with amazing worlds full of atmosphere and the feeling of being in a living, breathing place. Games like The Last of Us help us feel in ways we have never been able to feel while playing games before. These advances are great, but that doesn't mean that straight "gameplay" games have no place in the gaming spectrum. If Resogun is any indication, the opposite is true.

Resogun is a simple shoot-em up wrapped in gorgeous, new console sheen. Manning one of three different ships, it's your job to blow away all enemies and save the last humans. Moving around cylindrical levels, enemies will start to swarm the level, making a beeline to take you out. As you take out enemies and time passes, Keepers appear, which are the enemies that must be defeated to release the humans from prisons across the level. If you miss a single Keeper out of a set, the human dies. These Keepers range from enemies that fall from the sky and follow a path to a group that must be killed in specific order or the human will die. It's this simplicity that makes Resogun so easy to learn, but a real time commitment to master.

The controls are smooth and simple, mapping movement to the left joystick and shooting to the right stick. Adding some complexity to the simple combat are bombs, which wipe out all enemies in the cylinder, overdrive, which is charged up to fire a giant laser in front of your ship and boosting, which charges over time and allows you to quickly move your ship out of danger. All these abilities stack on top of each other to create this fluid system that feel so good when you play. When your ship goes down, it never feels like the fault of the game for being cheap, nor is it the controls for being laggy or unresponsive.

Though there are only five stages, each stage builds on the last with small increments of difficulty to make you more cautious and slowly make you better until the final confrontation with the last boss fight. For instance, in the first level the ground wraps around the entire level, but the second stage has sections of water that, if you're not careful, will cause you to lose a human. These little details matched with slowly growing waves of enemies and a variety of interesting enemy types keeps each you sucked in. Add this to the different levels of difficulty that range from hand-holding to punishingly difficult, there is a lot of meat to this game that will keep you coming back for hours.

That being said, if you don't like replaying the same stages over and over again (despite the difficulty changes), there may not be much reason to keep you coming back. Personally, this was not a problem for me, but it's something to keep in mind.

Arriving at launch, Resogun is still one of the strongest games on PS4. Every owner should download it and try it (right now! It's still free on PS Plus!). It's a great game to pick up and play in short bursts or for a couple of hours, working to beat your high score and keep the multiplier up. It's also a great controller passing game, playing with friends to see who can get the highest score. So stop reading and go download it now.